April tarot reading
Reading with the Queen of Cups plus tarotscopes for the month
For the other essays in the occasional series on the court cards of the tarot, find “Reading With the Queen of Coins” here. “Reading With the Queen of Wands” is here.
A lady with purple bangs and kind eyes was the first person I called a “healer” without flinching. Until very recently, Jan Wolfe was the owner of Elderberry Herbals, the apothecary here in Charlottesville that has become something of a second home to me over the last few years. If Jan were a tarot card, she’d be the Queen of Cups. She’s followed around by the end colors of the rainbow and a pervasive sense of reflection. Love of love, water of water, Jan is the kind of person whose ability to reflect yourself back to you comes from a deep well of patience and good will. Good faith, I should say, even when good faith seems long gone. During the pandemic, she kept The Elderberry going, because, to hear her tell it, what else would she do? When she gardens, she risks bee stings because she nestles her face among her plants, kissing them. Astragalus, blue vervain.
In the Waite-Smith tarot, the Queen of Cups’ skirt merges with the sea around her. She’s comfortable in nature, even when maybe she shouldn’t be. In Crowley’s deck, the queen is all reflective pools and lotus flowers. She’s more bird and whirl than human figure. There’s something about communication in these cards. This Queen does it differently; her understanding of bodies, whether human or not, comes from the authority of the flow. The movement of waves, petals, wind before they’re caught by name and form. Jan’s got some of all of this about her. “She is the perfect agent and patient, able to receive and transmit everything without herself being affected thereby,” Crowley writes of the Queen of Cups. Jan’s got something of this about her too. Receptive. Unflappable. Transmitting everything in her own perfect, slant way.
*
I met with Jan just a few weeks after my family and I moved to the area in 2022. A painful cyst was growing above my left implant. I was plagued with too-human fatigue. I knew my cancer was back, even if I couldn’t convince the “real doctors” to believe me. I knew I was staring down a fall and winter of chemotherapy even if the “real doctors”1 didn’t know it yet. I was tired of pretending cancer wasn’t my path to walk. I wanted care and support beyond and alongside what was offered at the hospital. Jan’s pages of herbal consultation forms seemed to suggest that she might be able to provide that for me. A nurse practitioner turned herbalist, she’d been helping Charlottesville residents through illness and pain, disease and recovery for more than a decade. I didn’t know much about herbalism at the time, but the thought of hot teas made especially for me filled me with a sense of self-kindness that I used to struggle to maintain on my own.
I met with Jan in the consulting room off the side of the Elderberry’s industrial kitchen. Later, I’d meet my own astrology and tarot clients in that little room. Later, I’d apprentice my dear friends Meg and Sydney in that room. But first, I was a client myself, scared, tired, sweaty, afraid of what Jan would say about the fact that I was sick, afraid of the judgment and disdain I’d found in other holistic health corners where the word “holistic” is a mask for fear of illness, anger at the world.
Talking to Jan was like talking to that rare friend who knows a lot more than you but has no pretense to know-it-all status. She listened, she interjected, she asked all the right questions. She mispronounced my name and laughed at herself. She never had to ask me to repeat myself; she never doubted me about my symptoms or what I understood to be true about my body. Jan is an authoritative healer because she identifies where the patient’s true authority lies. That’s quite a gift to give a sick person, to give any person, really, who has become used to feeling whipped around by life. She empowers honestly—by listening to and observing you then reflecting what she’s heard and seen back to you with simple sentences that nevertheless honor the depths of whatever’s been discussed.
“You really know your body,” she told me at one point during our two-hour session when I became teary and angry over my Nebraska surgeon’s mistreatment of me. “I can tell you really, really know your own body.”
My whole life I’ve been called clumsy, brainy, a bad dancer, a worse runner, a weak athlete all-around, a bad body. For most of my adult life, I tried on a shruggy defiance in response. I took all of those labels on myself, for good (“I’m a writer!” I say proudly to people) and for ill (it took me all of my twenties to shake myself out of the eating disorder that my disavowal of the body produced). Jan gave me a gift in that herbal consultation before my second cancer diagnosis. She told me the truth about myself: I know my body. I understand my body. I’m good to my body. I’ve been on its side for years, its best advocate throughout the pandemic, motherhood, and cancer.
*
As Neptune went into Aries last Sunday, a group of some 30 women gathered together beside a small pond and some beautiful woods to honor Jan’s retirement. She wore a tunic she’d sewed herself—large red poppies and green buttons, happy, sweet, self-knowing. The women in the circle spoke true words about Jan: dreamer, lover, mother, resilience, joy, miracle, magic. Heart, I said. Jan has, was, is, can heal with heart.
“The Elderberry is the heart of Charlottesville,” I’d told Meg and Sydney, the apothecary’s new owners, a few weeks ago. I really meant that. Jan started an herbal apothecary because when she took her first plant medicine class, she understood that’s where she could do “special work.” She didn’t want to be involved in medicine as a business. She wanted to be of service as a healer.
I know my body; Jan could read my heart. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to stumble into people who help us articulate what’s at the center of ourselves. No need to flinch if you stumble into Jan.
The bibliomantic tarotscopes for the individual signs for April are below. For the bibliomancy part, I’m using Arnold Mindell’s Dreambody: The Body’s Role in Revealing the Self. This book combines close readings of fairy tales and clients’ dreams with an exploration of the ways in which the images that surface in each coincide or amplify the somatic messages we receive from our physical and subtle energy bodies to help us understand states of psychological and physiological health, well-being, and illness. It’s a wonderfully kooky book that draws on Mindell’s strengths as a writer, psychologist, and body-worker to explore the connections between mind, body, and spirit in profound and useful ways.
The Queen of Cups is our tarot card for the month of April. In addition to the qualities I’ve elucidated through my tribute to Jan Wolfe above, this Queen esoterically rules the last ten degrees of Gemini and the first twenty degrees of Cancer. They show up in our chart as an authority on the mirror-like nature of emotions: Love is met with love through this Queen’s keen understanding of empathy. In their less dignified state, they can be a bit lost or thoughtless, or overwhelmed by the depth of their psychic nature. Boundaries are sometimes hard for this queen; speaking or writing “properly” or with urgency can be a challenge too. Above all, though, the card conveys a dreaminess and a tranquility, a sense of going with the flow, being one with the Tao, kissing the flowers in spite of the bees.
All good information for a month that sees the slowing down, stopping, and course corrections of currently retrograde Venus and Mercury, as well as tension between Mars and Pluto, as the planet of courage, conflict, and anger opposes for a third and final time the slow-moving planet of subterranean power and struggle. Jupiter is making its beneficent way toward the last ten degrees of Gemini, though. And the first two decans of Cancer are free and clear of Mars’ influence, ready to love and be loved on, ready to speak from the heart, and truthfully, too.
The way I do bibliomancy is to use the randomly selected quotations as a provocation to stir up some feeling, or some argument within myself. It’s not about whether I agree with these assertions, it’s more about what does it point me toward that I might need to understand, to develop understanding around? My own suggestions for the month follow the Dreambody quote. Read for your rising sign.
I’m happy to answer questions about this month’s tarot draw or astrology if you comment with your rising below.
Aries Rising: “The West attempts to create immortality and reach heaven mainly through good works, and more recently through psychological growth and self-knowledge. Our tendency to skip the body itself partially accounts for our compulsive preoccupation with material security and physical health. It is as if we skipped stages one through seven in order to rush to stage eight of life. But if the body is not integrated into self-knowledge, one becomes obsessed with well-being” (87). You’re good on good works, particularly when fueled by your own private desires to be of service in your neighborhood, on your blog, and with your siblings. April asks for a deeper focus on your body as “home,” though. Maybe you’ve been pulled in that direction for a while, maybe the thought of body positivity makes you flinch. Either way, goodness comes to you through an open-eyed acknowledgment of your own flesh and blood, scars and secret pains included. A mantra to say in the mirror: I am love of love. I am water of water. I move this way and that, and curl up when I need to, too.